If English wasn’t your first language, maybe if you learned English later in life, were there any words that you had a really hard time learning how to pronounce? Do you think that had to do with the sounds made in your first language?

  • Melobol@lemmy.ml
    6·
    22 小时前

    There are words I really hate struggle with…
    Whirl, macabre, dairy, faux, chique.

    • otp@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      17 小时前

      I feel like a lot of people just drop the “I a” and say “'preciate it!”, lol

      (That’s assuming you’re using it like “thank you”, and aren’t just starting a sentence)

      • khannie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        17 小时前

        Eye-ch-urn-ken?

        Irish and we have that gutteral Ch sound in Irish so I feel like it’s a cheat code for us.

            • Saurok@lemmy.ml
              3·
              14 小时前

              The ch digraph in both instances of Eichhörnchen is pronounced closer to the way you pronounce the first consonant in the word “hue”. It’s closer to the front of the mouth than the one you’re thinking of in Irish. It’s ç in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s a different sound than the other way that ch is pronounced in German and has to do with what sounds/letters appear around it. The other pronunciation of ch in German is normally pronounced as x (this sound is the one you’re thinking of that’s in Irish) or χ.

              • khannie@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                11 小时前

                That’s really clear, thanks. I learned a lot, including learning that I should not try to pronounce Eichhörnchen. :)

        • CuddlyCassowary@lemmy.world
          31·
          24 小时前

          Is it tricky? English is my first language and it doesn’t seem difficult to me, but I never gave it much thought. So fascinating.

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
            111·
            23 小时前

            It only has a single vowel, which is an r-coloured vowel…which most languages don’t have. For that matter, many languages don’t even have our “r” sound, so colouring a vowel with “r” is incredibly hard when you don’t even have that consonant to colour with!

            Not to mention that after using that r-coloured vowel, you have a semi-syllabic L immediately afterwards. (Is squirrel one syllable or two? Depends on who you ask I guess!). As you may know, L and R are the same in some languages. And even if a language has both AND pronounces them the same ways as English (not necessarily common), they might not allow an L to follow an R! (Just like how we don’t allow R to follow an L)

            Oh, and which vowel are we colouring? “i” or the “short I”. This is a very rare vowel, following a third dimension (tenseness) that the majority of other vowels don’t use. Not common in other languages, either!

            So that’s the last two sounds.

            The first three is a consonant cluster containing another uncommon consonant (w). And even ignoring that, s and k can’t always be combined together in other languages.

            So literally every sound in the word “squirrel” has something foreign and rare about it to many languages immediately as you start to get past that “s” sound. Brutal.

      • 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍@lemmy.world
        6·
        23 小时前

        This one’s actually funny to me. It’s a bit of a meme that francophones struggle with squirrel and anglophones struggle with écureuil, but I personally had no trouble with it. You just have to hear it once.

        • Cheesus@lemmy.ca
          3·
          21 小时前

          My francophone wife practiced saying squirrel for like 7 years before she was able to get it kinda right, so that’s very impressive if true. It doesn’t help that in my accent, it’s pronounced as one syllable. Even good approximations of the pronunciation that I’ve heard by French speakers are usually done in two syllables.

    • MoonMelon@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      16 小时前

      I was listening to a best-selling author’s recent audiobook, and the professional voice actress messed this one up. So you’re in good company. Really, who can we blame but the Greeks?

    • stray@pawb.social
      5·
      14 小时前

      Everyone has trouble with that one. There’s even a joke about it in Finding Nemo. I don’t imagine most English-speakers can spell it offhand.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    4·
    13 小时前

    I think I was just pronouncing everything wrong for the first several years I was speaking English because I learnt English from books and never heard most words out loud. But I don’t remember anything being physically difficult to pronounce in terms of emulating how it’s said when I first hear it pronounced “correctly”.

  • spongebue@lemmy.world
    10·
    12 小时前

    Don’t feel bad, everyone. English pronunciation IS difficult, though through tough thorough thought, you can do it!

  • gbzm@piefed.social
    2·
    22 小时前

    “Lapel” was an interesting find. That and “development” really hammered in the importance of accentuation. I’m still unsure of what I want to do with “schedule”. “Burger” sometimes sounds off when I say it.

    • stray@pawb.social
      2·
      14 小时前

      Schedule depends on where you’d like to blend into. You’ve got:

      • skedjuhl
      • sked-juul
      • shed-juul
      • shedj-yuu-uhl
      • skedj-yuu-uhl

      Possibly more! I think the ones with two syllables sound most common/least specific to a dialect. SK is more American and SH is more UK.

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    43·
    1 天前

    Colonel.

    Less of how hard it is to actually pronounce, more like how hard it is to believe it’s pronounced that way.